Lord Redwood (Con)

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord McCrea, for moving this amendment so that we can again debate this crucial constitutional matter. I have every sympathy with the points he made, because what we face again here is legislation by sleight of hand. We are in fact approving comprehensive regulations for the battery sector, but we are told they are none of our business as a United Kingdom Parliament because it was determined in Brussels, without any of our representatives present, and formed into a directive which is directly acting in Northern Ireland, an important part of our country. We are asked to debate today the much lesser issue of the impact of the enforcement mechanism, which we are allowed to discuss and approve, not the wider impact of the battery regulation on a growing and complex sector, with many businesses at stake. So the Minister is able to tell us—reasonably accurately, perhaps —that the impact assessment says that it is not going to cost very much because that impact assessment assesses only the administrative costs connected with creating these new offences. It does not go into the detail of what might happen if people actually had to pay the fines, of course, and it leaves out the question of the huge compliance costs with the underlying directive. The case being made is that it already applies, so businesses have already had to impose it. It is rather odd that the Government have not got round to putting in the enforcement mechanism until now. We have been told that it is much delayed compared with the EU’s requirement upon us, but, none the less, they got there in the end. The noble Lord, Lord McCrea, made the powerful point that in a democracy, if you are imposing potential large fines or imprisonment on people, that is surely something which your country and elected Parliament should control, not something which you are told you have to do because of an EU imposition on part of your country. My second great worry about this is that it illustrates not only that laws are imposed on Northern Ireland without proper debate, democratic consideration or economic assessment, but that we end up with them in Great Britain as well. We are now told by the Government that the only way they think they can guarantee the very important integrity of our internal market—with a far bigger economic impact on both sides of the Irish Sea than the issues the EU is imposing, and with far less trade at risk—is that it all has to be taken for granted and that we have to adopt the measures that the EU is imposing on Northern Ireland, otherwise our internal market will be disrupted. Not only does the Windsor Framework now mean that Northern Ireland has to accept undemocratic law on itself, but we will probably end up with it in GB as well. These are mighty issues arising out of what look like rather technical and small directives and statutory instruments to handle them. I again urge the Minister to take back to the wider Government that they cannot go on like this. They cannot go on pretending that we live in a sovereign democracy if, by the back door, these laws can be imposed on part of our country, and then perhaps on the whole country, without proper consideration. This must be the number one issue in the reset and the Government should not take no for an answer. There are easy solutions in a reset. Please get on with them.